Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

When Leopold's daughter Hildegard said her first sentences, she combined words from two
languages in one sentence together and was functioning as a monolingual. This (issue) has
set the tone for the study of BFLA until today.
Further issues for research were parent’s and educator’s concerns about bilingual education:
children are at risk of academic failure or delay (e.g. Macnamara, 1966), or BFL learners will
be socio-cultural misfits and identify with neither language group (Diebolt, 1968).
Leopolds finding that bilingual children may mix their languages, sometimes more so in the
early years than later on, gave rise to two opposing positions. Volterra and Taeschner (1978),
on the one hand, concluded that bilingual children do not have any difficulties in
comprehension and may have only one lexical system in the initial development of their
vocabulary. On the other hand, the idea that bilinguals have a lower IQ still exists among
some people. It is one of the persistent myths among monolinguals. Some believe that
bilingual children develop a single, unitary language system at the start, which then slowly
separates into two systems. This myth is hard to overcome, even though research comparing
monolinguals and bilinguals has shown that they score the same on IQ tests (with the same
gender, social class and age).
As Baker stated in the 1990s: “Far from making people mentally confused, bilingualism is
now associated with a mild degree of intellectual superiority” (Baker, 1995: 49).
In 20011, De Groot (2011) describes: “Multilinguals have not mentally compartmentalized
their languages in neatly separated sections, with solid firewalls between them, but all of the
languages known interact with one another, both during acquisition and use” (De Groot,
2011: 339).
Until the 1960s, scientific discussions and positions were based on a limited knowledge of
the working processes of the human brain. Since the introduction of the ‘Common
underlying proficiency’ by Cummins (1979, 2000) these assumptions and positions can be
considered as “old theory.”
Illustration 3.1: Separate underlying proficiency. Illustration 3.2: Common underlying proficiency.
The old theory, which remained in use until the late 1950s, was based on the idea that both
languages as such have a place in the cognitive system of the child (figure 3.1) and that these
two languages compete with each other in the development of the vocabulary, articulation,
and quality of speech. Therefore it was said that bilingualism and bilingual upbringing of
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